Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I too strongly support this move for redress and compensation for those who were involved in institutional sexual assault in these settings and the terrible wrongdoing inflicted on survivors that has been recognised here today. I will refer briefly to what has been a bipartisan effort, starting with the royal commission under the previous administration and then the redress scheme that was announced earlier this month.

But I also want to note that, in many cases, apologising on behalf of our predecessors is a privilege that we earn by ensuring that no such injustice occurs under our own watch. While it would be quite easy to remove the words 'institutional abuse' and substitute other forms of abuse that are occupying this building even as we speak this morning, we must be absolutely certain that the precursors and antecedents of this kind of abuse do not simply lead, generations later, to large redress schemes because we did not act on what was right in front of our eyes.

As a politician paid to talk,    I must confess many in the community are getting sick of talk. While money is a small proxy and substitute for talk, we would actually like to see these things addressed in real time and prevented. We can talk about institutional abuse, which was the issue over the last century. Right now we have complete separation of Indigenous Australia from economic and employment opportunities, leading to what we marched on today. And finally, in Queensland, we have a complete outbreak of child violence, injury and unexplained death due to an increasing use of ice and, most importantly, child protection cases not being adequately investigated at the time. It is so simple to apologise a generation later, isn't it? We do not have to look anyone in the eye who was actually there at the time except those who come and tell us a generation later. But we have exactly the same thing happening now.

So I am absolutely delighted that, in our term, we can do our best to draw a line under what happened in these institutions; invite other governments to be part of that; and actually identify and talk about, as a number of the previous speakers have done, the institutions that were involved. We are acknowledging openly the suffering of survivors, and of course the $550 million to $750 million compensation scheme with a per capita cap on that is an early start. But many will still have questions about how the scheme will work and whether there will be other conversations that could have come through other channels that will be denied them because of the Commonwealth Redress Scheme.

In Queensland we are talking about protection of children and an explosion in domestic violence. We are talking about cases that are not adequately investigated. If you go to North Queensland, where there has been some talk already, in North Queensland we have 826 substantiated cases of abuse but 2,631 unsubstantiated cases and, extraordinarily, 209 cases closed with no outcome at all. Where public notifications require an investigation of a tragic circumstance like this, 79 per cent of the cases are not seen within the required 10-day period. Where it is deemed to be incredibly urgent—and this notification requires a five-day investigation—fully 74 per cent of them are not investigated in the appropriate time. At the same moment as we apologise for our predecessors, we are seeing an explosion in the prevalence of family risk factors in these substantiated households. We are seeing family risk factors like, obviously, being abused as a child, criminal history in the household and domestic and family violence. But we are seeing drug and alcohol abuse increase by 12 per cent, not over a generation but since 2011, as a cause for child suffering, neglect, injury and death. Of course, we have mental health issues going from 37 to 49 per cent. I can see that greater recognition and identification of mental health may be a good thing even though, in a quantifiable sense, the number is increasing.

In causes of death in my state of Queensland—the one that I can speak of with some authority—we had 50 deaths of children at June 15 last year. It is 51 this year. Despite all of our work in accidents, halving the rate of suicide in Queensland over those two small samples, and getting control of SIDS and other unrelated conditions, we have seen a doubling of unknown or yet to be determined causes from 10 to 18 children this last 12 months. These need to be addressed as much as the redress scheme is required for the generations that came before. (Time expired)

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